Looking Expensive Isn’t the Goal. Looking Established Is.
Week 2 | Series 1: The Reputation Gap
As a business we never want to leave money on the table, and if you are in a business that others are in you can’t help but compare yours to theirs right? You see the people around you charging a mint, while you feel like you are in the bargain bin. All the “gurus” are saying “just raise your prices,” so you raised your prices… Boom! Nothing happened. What if i told you it wasn’t the price, but the fact that you made a claim and left all the evidence behind it exactly where it was.
Expensive and established get treated like the same signal. They aren’t. Expensive is you saying what you’re worth. Established is proof that other people already agreed with you, and when somebody is deciding whether to hire you, only one of those makes the decision feel safer.
the price advice is doing less than you think
You’ve heard it. Raise your prices. Charge what you’re worth. Look more premium and the right clients will find you. I’m not going to say that’s wrong, it’s just not ALL of the equation.
Let me tell you how much of the work it actually does, because that number is smaller than anybody selling the advice mentions.
There’s an analysis from 2007 that gathered up every decent study on price and perceived quality going back to the late eighties. Seventy one separate effects. The correlation landed around .29, which means price explains somewhere around nine percent of how people rate quality. Nine percent isn’t nothing. It’s also not a plan. The same analysis found the effect was weaker for services than for products off a shelf, and weaker among buyers who already knew the category.
Read that last paragraph again, because it’s a description of your next client. They’re buying a service. You’ve been there yourself, let’s say you’ve hired a lawn care service, your guy was terrible, but your neighbor’s lawn looks great. In both of these conditions price does the least work available to it.
There’s an older study that gets at the same thing. It found the price and quality relationship was positive, but it swung so wildly from one market to the next that you couldn’t really call it a rule. More like a tendency people trust more than it deserves.
what they’re actually doing
Managing risk. That’s it.
Buying a service is harder than buying an object and every researcher who has looked at it says the same thing. It’s because you can’t hold it first. It comes out a little different every time. It doesn’t exist until the moment it happens. There’s nothing to pick up and inspect, so there’s nothing to be reassured by.
It gets worse depending on what you do. Researchers sort services by how checkable they are, and the bottom category is the one where the buyer can’t fully judge the quality even after the work is finished and paid for. Strategy consulting. Legal advice. Financial planning. Coaching. Most of what your clients hire you to do is intangible, which is why they take so long to say yes to something they’ve already decided they want.
New and unknown providers get read as riskier than established ones. Not worse. Riskier. Nobody thinks you’re bad at your job, they probably have no idea. They just can’t confirm you’re good at it, and those two things cost you the same amount of money.
the worst square on the board
So put it together.
Somebody can’t verify your work. Can’t hold it. Has no evidence you’ve been doing this successfully for a while, Annnd your price is high! That doesn’t read as confidence to them. It reads as exposure. Same uncertainty, more money on the table. That makes being wrong about you more expensive without making it any less likely. That’s what people mean when they say a business is trying too hard. It’s not a comment about your taste. It’s arithmetic happening quietly in somebody’s head, and you never hear about it because nobody argues with you. They just don’t fill out the form.
the four boxes
Two axes. What you charge. What you’ve proven.
Cheap and unproven. You’re a commodity. Price is the only thing on the table because it’s the only thing anybody can compare.
Cheap and proven. Underpriced. Usually slammed. A lot of very good people live here for years and mistake being busy for being priced correctly.
Expensive and proven. What everyone’s after. The thing worth noticing is that the price barely gets examined here, because the evidence already answered the question that the price would have raised.
Expensive and unproven. The trap.When you raise your rates and change nothing else, you don’t move into the third box. You moved into the fourth one, and it feels the same from the inside looking out, which is the problem.
so what reads as established
It’s not polish! Polish costs about eleven dollars a month now and everybody has it, which is precisely why it stopped meaning anything.
You have to make them understand this is real, you are real, your expertise is real. Which is the point where this stops being a conversation about design and starts being one about photographs. A picture of you in your actual space, doing the actual work, is doing something a stock image can’t do no matter how good the stock image is. It’s proof of existence. It says this happened, here, and it’s been happening.
The failure with generic imagery isn’t that it looks bad. Half of it looks great. It’s that it proves nothing, and a business that proves nothing looks exactly like a business that just started.
The problem with Ai is that it reads fake, there is something soulless about it. You might not be able to put your finger on it , but it all feels the same, which feels cheep. It needs to be personal, you need to show up as an actual person.
I won’t shoot anybody before we sit down and talk. The question isn’t just what you want to look like. It’s which specific thing about your business a stranger currently can’t confirm, and what would put that in one frame.
the part that’ll annoy some people
If the only move you made toward premium was your price, you didn’t reposition anything. You raised the stakes on a bet your buyer was already unsure about.
The good news is the fix runs the other direction and it’s cheaper than you’d guess. Evidence first. Price second. Do it in that order and the price stops being the thing under examination.
Go pull up your own website and answer one question. If a stranger had to prove this business is real and has been running successfully for years, using nothing but what’s on that page, could they? Whatever they’d point at is your evidence.
If nothing comes to mind, that’s the finding.
Read Week 1 Here: https://www.ericcolemanphotography.com/why-people-guess-your-worth/
Eric Coleman is a brand photographer in Austin, Texas.
FAQ
Does charging more make people think I’m better? A little. Meta-analytic work puts the price-quality correlation near .29, and finds it weaker for services and weaker among buyers familiar with the category. That describes most professional services buyers.
Isn’t premium positioning about price? Price is part of it and the least load-bearing part. The evidence that supports the price is what does the work. Without that evidence, a higher price mostly increases perceived risk.
How do I look established if I actually just started? Show what is real rather than implying what is not. Actual environment, actual work, actual clients where you have permission. Fabricated longevity signals are the fastest way to lose the exact trust you were trying to build.
What is the difference between looking established and looking corporate? Corporate is a style. Established is a claim about time and repetition. You can look established and informal at the same time, and for most service businesses that combination outperforms both alternatives.
SOURCES
- Völckner, F., and Hofmann, J. (2007). The Price-Perceived Quality Relationship: A Meta-Analytic Review and Assessment of Its Determinants. Marketing Letters, 18(3), 181 to 196. 71 effects, correlation of .286, weaker for services and for familiar respondents.
- Rao, A., and Monroe, K. (1989). The Effect of Price, Brand Name, and Store Name on Buyers’ Perceptions of Product Quality: An Integrative Review. Journal of Marketing Research, 26(3). Positive but widely variable across markets.
- Murray, K., and Schlacter, J. (1990). The Impact of Services Versus Goods on Consumers’ Assessment of Perceived Risk and Variability. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. Services carry higher perceived risk.
- Mitchell, V., and Greatorex, M. (1993). Risk Perception and Reduction in the Purchase of Consumer Services. The Service Industries Journal, 13(4). Intangibility, heterogeneity, perishability, inseparability.
- Mitra, K., Reiss, M., and Capella, L. (1999). An Examination of Perceived Risk, Information Search and Behavioral Intentions in Search, Experience and Credence Services. Journal of Services Marketing. Credence services carry the highest perceived risk.
